Exuberant Verbosity

Abnegation. Anadems. Argence. Bartizans. Bedizened. Benignant.
Benison. Brume. It's an addiction: I can't read Stephen R. Donaldson
without jotting down his latest researches into the Ultra-Complete
Maximegalon Dictionary. In the new Thomas Covenant epic, Against All
Things Ending, he mingles new discoveries with old favourites....

I love SF's weird words, not so much invented languages like Klingon
as bizarre one-offs. In John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider,
future people don't say "OK" but "Sweedack",
supposedly from the French "Je suis d'accord" – a likely
story. Larry Niven offers the feeblest ever swear-word with "Tanj!",
standing for "There ain't no justice!"

SF technospeak is crammed with silliness. When someone in Neal
Stephenson's Anathem says "I have to counter-strafe the new
clanex recompensators ...", the reply is a huge relief: "I
have no idea what this means." I never grasped the scientific units
in Arn Romilus's Brain Palaeo: "As you know, the Masters
possess a positive potential of several thousand bratilgrovits on which
they depend for motivation." Even when you substitute "Laws of
Robotics" for the jargon in the following, there still seems to be
some problem: "Robots were constructed with an inbuilt verboter
unit, preventing them from either doing or not doing an action that
might result in harm to a human." (Gardner F. Fox, Escape
Across the Cosmos.)

Some words aren't meant to be understood. The tragedy of future
humanity in Brian Aldiss's "The Failed Men" is the maddeningly
untranslatable "struback". Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and
Hemlock features a McGuffin of which nothing is known but its name,
the Obah Cypt. A similar problem bedevils the quest for the Throme (the
what?) in Patricia McKillip's The Throme of the Erril of Sherill.
An alien Platonian in John Brunner's "Out of Order" reveals
that his idea of fun involves pretonsuling and incoblapsimine, whose
meaning we mercifully never learn. And who could argue with the profound
saying quoted by Alfred Bester's time-traveller: "The Future is
Tekon"? ("Of Time and Third Avenue".)

Before Hitchhiker, Robert Sheckley was the master of silly sf
terms. In "Bad Medicine", the hero's psychotherapy machine
proves to be a Martian model which diagnoses feem desire – a vile
perversion – and urgently insists that he try to remember his
goricae. Another hapless Sheckley hero in "Protection" is
adopted by a gronish (ie. invisible) validusian derg, whose friendly
help unfortunately makes him vulnerable to nastier beings like the
gamper, grailers, leeps, feegs, melgerizer and thang. To avoid the
dreaded thang, it's vital not to lesnerize. Our man has no idea
what this means. The story ends as he's about to sneeze. Or in Thomas
Covenant phrasing, to sternutate.